Scribbles in the Margins Page 6

  Each new book is a gift to one’s self, a necessary indulgence. It is held and considered before the real diversion can begin.

  36

  The back cover

  The back cover is consulted only after the front has been favourably judged. It hides, often with its face to the wall like a naughty schoolchild, until flipped over in someone’s hands, their interest piqued. The front cover is eye-contact, the back a first conversation.

  Fingers twist the book around and thumbs lock it in place, its corners nestled in our palms. Laid before our eyes is a banquet where everything is in its place, and with all the pleasing symmetries and sure features of a weather map. It offers the quiet assuredness of a childhood Sunday visit to our grandparents’ house: all is where it usually is and should be; everyone is sitting in their rightful positions on furniture which seems to be bolted to the carpet.

  A back cover’s features are anchored and welcome. They exist, of course, to sell a book to us, yet only via the gentlest of whispered persuasions. There is often an endorsement quote from another author or a newspaper review, enthusing like a fan but never hectoring like some soap-box zealot. Two or three lines in larger fonts seek to summarise the book’s contents, leaving no obligation to read onwards through a size-12 blurb, itself sprinkled with soft and friendly adjectives such as ‘moving’ or ‘affectionate’.

  Then, regular furniture rests at the cover’s foot: a clinical definition of the book’s genre to help booksellers – ‘Cycling/Travel’ directing the Saturday boy in his shelving chores; the cryptic codes and monochrome ribbons of the ISBN; prices nestled in the corner as if an afterthought, though not hidden to echo pernicious small print but murmured as if in apology that something so august as a book should be sullied by commerce; and details of a work’s publishing house, not often a common language but always a steadying presence. Such markings are an identity badge and lanyard asserting a book’s solid credentials without fuss. In their presence on each volume we consider reading they sate a human need for continuity and security.

  The back cover may be obscured by its noisier big brother at the front, but while the latter offers lust and attraction, the former is an object of matter and substance. The two contrive to pull a reader towards a book, after which point love is entirely possible.

  37

  Reading on public transport

  It may be the forty-minute plod to work, or seven hours rolling along inter-city tracks. Knees are bent and soles rested on floors two feet over urban tarmac or 10,000 above an ocean. Perched upon a liveried seat of moquette or leather, the moment has come to suspend timetables and remove the clock hands.

  To open your book is to begin a retreat. Elbows are delicately arranged, place marker sought, reading matter rested on lap as if being nurtured, page spreads flattened with two knuckles, and sightlines tested and set. The human spine slaps against transport furniture and aligns with its literary brethren. In your possession is a magic wand that can whisk you away from a dreary place. Gripping and hoisting a book in front of you withdraws surroundings and leaves you in splendid isolation, in a distant world. Work colleagues may snipe about unseen managers, neighbours may barter stories of disease and death, and rowdy families may bay for attention but, as lines drift by, such distractions are swatted away. A book is both an aerial that can engage a signal received by no one else, and a Do Not Disturb sign on a hotel door handle.

  Time shifts. Reading suits the rat-tat-tat rhythms of rail travel, your eyes darting along a track of their own, and the stop-start huff and puff of a bus journey, each halt and manoeuvre a paragraph outside the page. Even the sounds and jolts of an aeroplane are muffled once a book takes hold.

  Your face wears a serious and yet absent expression. You have left the vehicle. Little other than daring, insolent fellow passengers with their interruptions, or the angst of travel delays and strife, can seep through and break the spell. In its own manner, so can drifting off on a warm coach, when fairytale half-sleep rolls closed resistant eyes like tinned sardine lids in reverse. A book’s turns and shapes leak into slumber, fuelling perplexing dreams.

  When your dull conscience whispers that you have nearly missed your stop, the book is slammed shut, thrown down and a dash back to reality begun. Already, you are looking forward to the return journey.

  38

  Escaping into an atlas

  Some types of book tip us backwards, towards innocent awe: large volumes with ornate illustrations and cross-section diagrams that show the reader ‘how’ and ‘why’; busy almanacs of world records, conspiracies and curiosities; and compendiums of cartoon strips with their ellipses promising danger and derring-do. But most seductive of all is the atlas.

  This world between covers is gathered from the shelf when it suddenly becomes important to check where Chichester is. As eyes hover over England, they rest on Eastleigh, and then pick up the sure black squiggles of a railway branch line. That line is traced along the coast to Portsmouth, Brighton and Hastings, before a hop above Norfolk, Hull and Scarborough, each a flickering recollection of an incident, holiday, person or April afternoon, like cue cards teeing up sainted or hazy memories. To shake ourselves free and awaken elsewhere, atlas pages are shuffled and wafted onwards.

  Sure lettering in the top right-hand corner announces, ‘Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany’. Such two-page spreads throb with detail and intrigue, a crowd of place names jostling for position and waving for attention. Light purple borders trickle freely, resembling the backs of old men’s hands, and blood-red roads dilly-dally across the page. In a City Plans section, the half-hexagon grids of Amsterdam, the prim and proper right angles of Toronto and the artful chaos of Paris sing of difference and contrary humanity. Future trips and adventures form as we look downwards and stalk our way across city and country. Some will one day turn to firm plots, dreams come true.

  Onwards goes the tour of page and place. Over Murmansk or Pittsburgh, or in the hot-baked towns of Western Australia, lost in an atlas we ponder lives lived there. We picture people working, moving, kissing, striving; their existences mutually and emphatically unaware of ours, our worries or ambitions. Our fates shall never cross, but an atlas at least prompts a fanciful, longing glance. It turns us into novelists, choosing a place and conceiving a character, from the lonely cargo sailor skating along the pleasing blue of the Atlantic Ocean to the petrified climber lost among Andes mountain terracotta. Better still if yours is an old atlas, dripping with long-gone lands and old ideas, all contriving to conjure up another time in the imagination.

  On fingertips we stroll across the world. The atlas allows the static mind to be broadened and opens access to secluded jungle rivers, glistening lakes and echoing airports. Its pages are laid with nourishing, unending detail that breathes into us the comfort of being part of something colossal. These are mesmeric sheets of fascination. Backwards we go.

  39

  Moving in with somebody and finding doubles

  There you are, your congregations of tawny boxes lined against a barren wall. Each box varies in size, some snaffled from supermarkets, some issued by the removal company, some from the last time either of you moved. Many bow underneath heavier items, boxes with marker-pen declarations of ‘kitchen stuff’ caving into those branded ‘towels’. Amalgamation is underway. Tin openers, toothbrush holders and washing baskets are becoming one.

  When the move is complete, the door slams shut with an echoed clatter and leaves you to your mixed feelings of giddiness and terror. You slide down the wall before resting on scuffed floorboards and dusty skirting boards. An hour later, takeaway food and booze have drawn a warm veil around you. Life is fuzzy and exhilarating and bonny enough for finding music and unpacking books from boxes.

  Beneath the glee there is nervousness to this process, and questions of dense matter. It may be the first time either of you has formally moved in with someone you aren’t related to. Frictions lurk in shoe cupboards and sock drawers. Since books were pe
rhaps one of the things which drew you together in the first place, introducing your collections to one another means trepidation. This is probably as close as you’ll get to creating a stepfamily. How will his disturbingly comprehensive collection of railway books get on with your complete works of Thomas Hardy? Should both stocks be intermingled, or their separate identities preserved, with the added bonus of a clean, easy break should the worst happen?

  The signs for your relationship are good, though, if a merger feels right. All boxes are thrown open. One by one, novels 20 centimetres high and biographies three inches fat leave their temporary shanty town in a procession. They are grouped together – his novels and yours, your non-fiction and his – and then shelved with the kind of intricacy that turns a Thursday dusk into a Friday dawn. Wonderfully, every half hour or so, one of you may exclaim ‘match!’, ‘doubler!’ or ‘I’ve got this too!’ Many you already knew of – there is just something more tangible and meaningful now these matches have met – and many you didn’t. In these brief moments of pairing, it feels as though droplets of a tidy future are falling around you. Your new flat alters rapidly from carcass to cradle. All will be well and rosy.

  40

  Giving a book as a present

  What to buy in those frazzled moments when a gift is needed? It springs a niggling kind of fear upon the present-buyer, not least at Christmas when lists are made, broken and made again. A badly judged present is enough to prompt internal questions about a friendship or family tie. It is tantamount to casting a gypsy curse upon its recipient, even though their polite smile feigns gratitude. Choosing a book as the gift shrinks the likelihood of such a dud, and showers over the giver a feeling of serenity, as if he is some cordial monk offering quiet blessings before retreating.

  Every now and again the book offered as a present has been directly mentioned, often accompanied by the words, ‘But, honestly, don’t bother getting me anything this year,’ or taken as an inkling from a recent conversation. Beyond such direction, choosing correctly is a fine balance of science and heart, often underwritten by a check with the receiver’s partner. There is a protracted bookshop visit involving the initial selection of two or three possible choices. They are then set down on a display table, finalists prodded and judged like prized cattle, and the winner selected after a period of earnest deliberation. Though there is a temptation to impose and prescribe reading matter, not always will these purchases be to your taste, as reflected in your justification of them at the till. ‘That’s what they all say,’ offers a wary shop assistant while sliding a True Crime Special annual into a carrier bag.

  After careful inscription and dating, the book is prepared for its new life. Wrapping it is infinitely more pleasurable than packaging other items, such are its even lines and taut corners. Three shards of Sellotape are rubbed into place making agreeable security guards, and a tag added to identify yourself with this most civilised of offerings. Following delivery, its obvious identity beneath a tree or marooned on a gift table is part of the charm: the book has no pretence or mystique, beyond the wonder of which title it could be, and is a guarantee of future blessed solitude to a birthday or Christmas-besieged recipient.

  Should you witness your gift being unwrapped, the recipient’s reaction will, at the very worst, be one of curiosity. It is unlikely that disappointment or disgust will rise there and then. Most likely is the consideration of your offering’s title, and a quick roll over to eye its back-page credentials, before another present is dangled.

  Delight in the giving is usually delayed. It rises later in the occasion when on Christmas Day late afternoon you notice the recipient filed away in a corner, flicking and beginning. Or it can bubble-up following the event – weeks after a family party, a message reaches you that ‘Peter is enjoying that smashing whisky book you got him.’ There is an almost selfish type of joy in becoming aware that you bought such pleasure, but it is bathed in the warmth of one who knows how it feels to be gifted a fitting book. For when it comes to books, receiving is the only thing greater than giving.

  41

  The calm a room of books brings

  Rooms full of books are not entered in a rush. The threshold of a library, pub lounge, bookshop or room in a house is breached with calm reverence, as in a place of worship. Once crossed, the book lover’s pulse quickens. He or she pauses and gazes around to find they are encircled by books, before the heart slacks to the quarter peals of a village church bell. A deep and irresistible calm has arrived.

  Senses are heightened. It feels as if you can hear the carpet swoosh beneath your feet, competing with pages being slid across one another and turned with a rip, a wave hissing in and smashing against the harbour wall. The wet-wood bookish scent burrows into your nose. It could be an offensive smell, and yet, because it is caused by a book’s ingredients and because it is infusing a room such as this, it serves to draw you further towards tranquillity. The walls are muffled by their contents, adding to a sensation of protection, haven and retreat. No matter how many games of Cluedo you have played, nor the number of murder mysteries you have read, it feels like nothing bad could possibly happen in a room full of books.

  Rather quickly for a space in which time seems denser, you lose yourself in the spines. Ageing hardbacks are most adept at drawing in this welcome displacement. Their coarse, scaly covers in steadfast greens, blues and maroons feel like the backdrop for a dream, equally alluring whether forgotten Dickens titles or botanical surveys. Fingers brush and knead them, as if magic can be dabbed and pocketed, and titles are dutifully taken down, pondered and then restored.

  What sweet serenity to be encompassed by no decoration other than the words writers toiled over, to be barricaded among these entrancing objects, each with its own characters, hopes and dreams. Should the rest of the world implode, you would be just fine in this Elysian bunker.

  42

  Pretending to have read something you should have

  The first year of university. A shoebox cell in halls of residence. Polyester curtains that make shellsuit noises when tugged closed, and a squeaky mattress that repeats every toss and turn. In one corner, a low sink, in the other a lonely open wardrobe. The walls, cursed with slices and nicks, are all mine to populate. I do so with posters of French cinema I’ll never see, bands I’m not cool enough to actually like and prints by artists I don’t understand. Like half my VHS collection, CDs and books (the half on display), it is a pretence. The aim is to convey a sophisticated, appealingly aloof and charmingly troubled young man to the sequence of equally urbane women who will pass through. They never do. At least I am prepared, though.

  Nearly two decades on, and the need to impress has been mostly dissolved by a mortgage and nappies. Yet there is one survivor: I still occasionally pretend to have read something I haven’t. Even worse than that, I enjoy doing so.

  It is usually something revered, a classic or a modern marvel. More than once, it has been a book I was told to read at school and so took umbrage with, as is a teenager’s moral duty. Skeleton knowledge, scraped long ago from York Notes, helps me hold a conversation about such books, ditto watching a television adaptation or reading book reviews. Often, I own the work in question, it is just that the bookmark has not moved beyond page 32, but I get the idea.

  The start of the deceit is not wholly my fault. I do not go around claiming to have read words I haven’t in some dull replica of my student walls. The fraud is induced. Others begin talking and bubbling wildly about a book, my smile and brief knowledge is taken to be a deep acquaintance, and then I do not have the heart to puncture their balloon. Besides, I am by now gratified by the thrill of the lie and feel like a sharp-suited spiv, the brains behind a very mild sting. I nod along, and yes, I loved that part too. I am a budget kingpin and I am getting away with it.

  Beyond the raw tingle of breaking an honest life with the gentlest of swindles, there are probably deeper reasons at play. To fake is to avoid incredulous, high-pitched reactions (‘YOU�
��VE NEVER READ TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD?!’) and resultant lectures. In darker hours, it is to avoid appearing a lesser reader or to feign intellectual prowess. Mostly, though, it is the best way to avoid causing offence.

  There comes a day when, finally, the great un-read and lied-about is tackled. They were right, Huckleberry Finn is impeccable. You just can’t now say so.

  43

  Hotel, B&B and cottage ‘libraries’

  In the life of the hotel lobby and the B&B lounge, the rented-cottage living room and apartment-block dining area, they are incidental. These small collections of books rank below corkscrews and cutlery drawers in the hierarchy of accommodation clutter, on a par with empty vases and superfluous chairs. They are extras, and rarely even the most read items in the room, flagging behind folders with plastic wallets containing Local Information, and a well-used Visitors’ Book.

  Still, their books remain, fluttering their covers as if by motion-sensor when guests pass. These squashed libraries are never billeted in purpose-built quarters. Their eclectic subject range is to be found stacked on pine DVD stands, former bedroom chests with the drawers removed, and neglected window sills. How these orphans arrived in holiday lodgings can only be speculated at. Some are the cottage owner’s or hotel staff’s surplus stock, or the holidaymaker’s luggage allowance makeweight.